


The Myth of Unicorns

by VoidVesper



Category: Adam Driver - Fandom, Medieval Times Dinner & Tournament, Saturday Night Live
Genre: Adam Driver looked amazing in that leather armor and author is not sorry, Being true to yourself, Chivalry, Courtly Love, F/M, Hair Brushing, Hair Kink, Hair Washing, Long Hair, New Jersey, Princess - Freeform, Remembering What Matters, Romantic Lost In A Hook-Up World, Self-Discovery, Unicorns, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Virginity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-11
Updated: 2020-03-11
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:08:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23107492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VoidVesper/pseuds/VoidVesper
Summary: The aftermath of Cameron's outburst, and what it meant for the actress playing the princess on the throne.
Relationships: Adam Driver/Original Female Character(s), Adam Driver/Reader, Cameron (Saturday Night Live)/Original Female Character, Cameron (Saturday Night Live)/Reader
Comments: 8
Kudos: 15





	The Myth of Unicorns

Princesses of the realm do not vape. It embarrasses you, to be sitting backstage, still wearing the gold lamé costume you are forbidden to drink or eat or smoke in, cold grainy ice pack pressed to the purple goose egg swelling above your eyebrow, vape pen wobbling between your shuddering fingers. Nobody gives you hell about the whispery scent of crème brulee that haloes you, gives your vice away. Not today.

Cameron didn’t go quietly. Handcuffs, red and blue police lights, evacuate the arena. Police statements from everyone. 

_Did he hurt you?_ Yes. Dave, that big coward, that fat puffed-shirt bore who goes on and on in rehearsals about how all his Method work to be King has made him “really embody the regal ideal” in his own life, turned and ran as soon as he saw Cameron charging your way. That’s when the edge of Cameron’s homemade weapon caught you right above the eye. Your vision filled with crackling orange stars before you hit the floor, wrist-first. That sharp frightening thunderclap of pain the moment it sprained. 

The sudden shocked light of awareness breaking into Cameron’s eyes when he saw you hurt.

Did you hear it? Or did you imagine it? His whisper: “Are you okay?” before they dragged him away?

 _Did the suspect give any indication he was planning something like this?_ “No”, you say. What the hell indication did Cameron give of anything? The dude was 500 pounds of surly horseflesh trapped in a world two sizes too small for him. You don’t know why he drove such a tiny hatchback. You don’t even know how he squeezed himself into it. He’d sequester himself into it on show days, screaming and air drumming and thrashing his inky thick headbanger hair in some arcane pre-show ritual, the muffled cadences of Rush reverberating booming ultrasound vibrations beyond the car's closed windows. He reminded you of a chick trapped in an egg, slick and angry and ready.

 _Ma’am, are you looking to press charges?_ “Don’t ask me that,” you say. “I just need to get my head together for the 7:30 show.”

“7:30 show is cancelled,” says Steve P. “Everyone go home.”

They wrap up your wrist in gauze tape. Everyone is going to the Rounder Pub to drink away the stun. You don’t want to go. You wriggle out of the 16th century and into yoga pants and sweatshirt. You don’t bother to wash off your stage makeup.

You’ve got your keys in your car’s lock when you realize Cameron’s car is still parked here.

You hesitate.

You walk over.

You want to see the egg he barely fits in. Maybe just to understand what kind of strange bird he is. Maybe for another reason.

_Are you okay?_

You make blinders with your palms and peer in the glass. It’s a mess. But not a slob’s mess, not fast food wrappers and cigarette butts. A fevered mind’s mess. Ragged-edged spiral notebooks shedding torn strips. Books about the medieval era, marked with Bergen Community College stickers on the spines. Culture, warfare, crusades, Chaucer, the writings of Hildegarde of Bingen. The hatchback’s so old it’s got a cassette deck. You can read the labels on the tapes in the shoebox: Rush, Yes, King Crimson, Hawkwind. No aux cable in the cigarette lighter. He doesn’t want to belong to this world.

And aren’t you a bird out of time, too? Telling your new workmates your name is Rowena because you don’t want to be Candace, Candace of the realm of Lyndhurst, NJ, of Red Bulls and gel nails and your friend’s irregular pap smears. Candace who never got the courage to face your friend’s astonished sneers when you squeaked, _hey, let’s go to Ren Fest, it might be fun._ The disgusted curl of their gloss-glazed, filler-swollen lips told you all you needed to know. _Ren Fest is for nerds, what are you going to do there, six bucks for a mead? What the fuck is a mead? Although Candace has always been hot for guys in kilts or whatever, right?_ Candace who dropped out of cosmetology school. Candace who didn’t know what to do for a little while, and drank too many hard seltzers, and started ehh-dating a guy who’s the equivalent of the bowl of pretzels you don’t like but keep eating. Candace of the realm of Her Mother’s Basement.  
Candace who forgot.

The door’s unlocked. The smell of him hits you. It makes something in you pulse.

You think about the first time you met him. A go-around-the-room icebreaker on the first day. _Hiii, my name’s Rowena, my favorite food is rhubarb, my favorite drink is rum, and I like to do the rhumba._ All lies. Your name is Candace and your favorite food is crème brulee vape and your favorite drink is Cameron, strange Cameron, not-of-this-time-or-place Cameron, Cameron who played the icebreaker _Hi, I guess it’s my turn, my name is Cameron, I don’t think about food or drinks or dances._ Then someone pressed _it’s just a game, pick something with C, “yes, and” it, Cameron_ and Cameron answered _Chivalry._

And you think about those guys in kilts on the covers of romances in your Grandma’s basement, the ones she’d never let you read. And the summers you spent at her house in South Plainfield, girlish legs long in shorts, knees scabbed, skipping through the modest forest of their wide backyard, running your hands over the mottled camouflage bark of the sycamore trees, imagining yourself a fair maiden into whose lap a unicorn would lower its head, gratefully, blessedly. Your grandma brushing and braiding your long blonde hair like you requested– two plaits at the hairline, joined in the back, like a princess. Like the noble women on the cover of those novels. You almost thought about cutting that hair when you quit cosmetology school. Getting that breakup bob all women do at some point. But who were you breaking up with? Pretzel Bro was long gone. Maybe it meant breaking up with the feeling of a grandma’s hands gently brushing your hair, the soft magnetic tingle that made you think hairdressing could be the answer in a world where you couldn’t be a unicorn-blessed maiden.

Maybe it meant breaking up with yourself.

And then, before you did, you applied for the hostess job at Medieval Times. And they took one look at your hair and asked if you’d like to audition.

There’s a long onyx hair on the steering wheel. You pick it up and pull its length through your hands. You feel the squeak of healthy hair when you stroke its length with your pinch one way, and its sleek elasticity the other. Guys always have healthy long hair. It’s because they don’t stress it with bleach and heat and elastic. They leave it unwashed for too long in benign neglect. There’s the tiniest bit of a split end at the tip but other than that it’s perfect.

On sudden impulse you run the length of it through your mouth. Thread it taut over your tongue.

You have a sudden sensation of what it would feel like to wash his hair. To have his head bent back in the sinks at the old cosmetology school, you standing over him. Would he even fit in one of those sinks? And the sudsy stroke of your hands through his hair, across his magnificent skull, your slim hands so tiny and lost in the ink flow of his locks. Leaning over him, like you have to when you wash someone’s hair, your breasts modest inches from his face. Both of you ignoring each other’s bodies with the detachment of when a doctor examines you, a strange set of Mardi Gras circumstances where the rules don’t apply, where a fair maiden can lean over a man closely enough to feel the heat of his skin glowing on her sternum and it’s not an invitation to ravishment. Except you’re thinking it, and maybe he’s thinking it too. He’s not resisting. He’s allowing you to run his hands through his mane and even though the suds have disappeared, you don’t want to stop.

But that won’t happen now.

It’s not too late to join your co-workers at the bar.

He won’t come back for his car. Not tonight. How long does it take to be processed, fingerprinted, Miranda-ed for assault? He’ll come back, maybe tomorrow, when he’s out of jail, thrust into making sense of a life that became too complicated in an instant and that will be the end of it. 

You’ll never see him again.

You wind his hair around your finger.

You remember the imagined weight of a unicorn’s head resting in your lap. The way as a girl you stroked the grass to conjure the feel of its thick mane, the way you could almost feel the swirling ridges of its horn as your hand ghosted up and down in the space where it would be. How you would sit timelessly, in a child’s imaginary space, in sunlight filtered through the tall sycamore canopy, motes of dust aflame around you like fairy lights.

You don’t want to live in a world without magic.

Maybe he won’t be back. Maybe there’s a restraining order. Maybe they’ll just tow the car.

You bite your lip. You could leave a note with your cell number. Or your address.  
That seems crass. Not because it’s forward. Just because it’s modern.

Will a unicorn lay its head in the lap of someone not a maiden?

 _I guess it depends what really takes your maidenhood_ , you think.

There is only one thing to leave. The answer to his question, and the question you’d been asking yourself. You tear a page from his spiral notebook. You take the crenelated strip left behind, too. With a dab of spit you stick a finger’s length of the strip into a circle. A little paper crown.

You blot your stage makeup lipstick on the page and write beneath your chaste lip print:

_Yes I am ok_

  
My unicorn, don’t come back. Leave this broken egg and this parking lot and the kingdom of New Jersey. I will go alone into the faery ring where we both belong. If my lap is worthy, lay your head upon it when you find me. I will not resist.

  
I will not forget.


End file.
